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ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



AN ADDRESS 



DELIVERED ON 



LINCOLN DAY, 1907 

IN 

MEMORIAL HALL 
CHICAGO 

BY 

CHARLES JOSEPH LITTLE 



Published by Request 



1907 

M. Umbdenstock & Co. 

LITHOGRAPHERS AND PRINTBRS 
CHICAGO 



Gift 
PubUsher 

5£P !6 1929 



L77 



MEMORIAL HALL 

CHICAGO, ILL. 

It has been the custom of the Grand Army Hall and Ale- 
morial Association on the 12th day of February in each ye^r to 
observe with fitting ceremonies the birthday of Abraham Lin- 
coln the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navv of the 
United States during the rebellion period. On these occasions 
It has been usual to invite a distinguished and patriotic citizen 
to deliver the address. At the Lincoln day celebration for the 
year 1907, the Reverend Charles Joseph Little, President of 
he Garrett Biblical Institute at Evanston, Illinois, was invited 
to deliver an address upon Abraham Lincoln, which was en- 
joyed by a very large and distinguished audience. Upon the 
cessation of the hearty applause following the address, a mo- 
tion was made and unanimously carried by a standing vote re- 
questing the Association to publish and distribute copies of the 
address. 

The board of directors of the Association then sent a letter 
to Dr. Little, the speaker, as follows : 

• Chicago, February 22, 1907. 

Key. Charles Joseph Little, 

Evanston, Illinois. 
Dear Sir : 

The undersigned, members of the Grand Army Hall and 
iAIemonal Association, and their friends, were more than de- 
lighted with the address you delivered on Lincoln Day at Me- 
morial Hall, and we take this occasion to express to\'ou our 
most sincere thanks therefor 

The subject was so forcefully and beautifully treated in 
your address, that we feel it should have a wider hearin- and 
influence than with the audience who were so fortunate"as to 
listen to you on that occasion. 

We therefore respectfully request that vou furnish us a 
copy of the address for publication and distribution, pursuant 
to the resolution unanimously adopted by the audience when 
you had finished speaking. 

Very respectfully, your obedient servants. 
(Signed by Officers and Afembers of the Association.) 



^ — 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



Just forty-six years ago yesterday, Abraham Lincoln 
parted from his friends and neighbors, "not knowing," he said, 
"when or whether ever I may return and with a task before 
me greater than that which rested upon Washington." And 
then he added : "Without the assistance of that Divine Being 
who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assist- 
ance, I cannot fail." He never returned; only the shattered 
tenement of him was given back to the people of Springfield. 
The man himself, his mind, his magnanimous soul, his patient, 
resolute, indomitable will, the indestructible Abraham Lincoln, 
had entered into the hearts of his countrymen and into the 
memory of the civilized world, there to abide, an energ}- for 
political righteousness, so long as freedom and fraternity re- 
main emblazoned upon the banners of human progress. 

Abraham Lincoln was always nobler than his surround- 
ings and wiser than his companions; but there has been in 
many places, and not seldom here in this great State to which 
his name and that of Grant have given imperishable lustre, a 
somewhat grudging recognition of his nobility and wisdom. 
His image has been obscured by the out-breathings of men who 
thought that he was altogether such an one as themselves and 
who fastened upon the defects of his massive nature as though 
they w^ere the substance of his being; men who w^ere fain to 
magnify their own pettiness by creeping into some crevice of 
his character. 

You will permit me, therefore, to begin with a paragraph 
from one of his early speeches, a paragraph that lives in my 
mind as the cathedral utterance of Abraham Lincoln, because 
I can never recall it without the vision of some mighty struct- 
ure soaring upwards like the dome of St Peter's or the spires 
of Cologne's beautiful temple into that ampler ether where a 



sublime human achievement is made glorious by the greetmg 
of the radiant skies 

Speaking of the slave power, he exclaimed: "Broken by 
it, I, too, may be ; bow to it, I never will. The probability that 
we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the 
support of a cause which we deem to be just. It shall not 
deter me. If I ever feel the soul within me elevate and expand 
to those dimensions, not wholly unworthy its Almighty Archi- 
tect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country deserted 
by all the world besides, and I, standing up boldly and alone 
and hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors. Here with- 
out contemplating consequence, before high Heaven, and in 
the face of the world, I swear eternal fidelity to the just cause, 
as I deem it, of the land of my Hfe, my liberty, and my love." 

There is the key to the pecuHar character of Abraham 
Lincoln. His soul was capable of infinite expansion; and 
under the inspiration of great opportunity and tremendous re- 
sponsibility his soul did expand to dimensions not wholly un- 
worthy of its Almighty Architect ; but it was a soul whose final 
majesty, whose ultimate harmonious proportions were never 
quite comprehended by men who boasted that they too, were 
hewn from the same rough quarry and who flattered them- 
selves that they, too, might have expanded to the same grand- 



eur. 



Yet even these could not hide the fact that Lincoln had been 
always a being apart ; friendly, sociable, kindly, helpful ; but 
singularly although not offensively unlike his neighbors. The 
strength of a giant was the servant of "a heart as big as his 
arms were long." Like Garibaldi, the hero of United Italy, he 
could not bear the sight or sound of needless suffering. Big- 
ger and stronger than any of his companions, he was the gen- 
tlest of them all. But the quality of his mind was wholly dif- 
ferent from theirs ; indeed it was of a quality exceedingly rare 
in the whole world. Lincoln had marvelous mental eyesight. 
He looked not so much at things as into them. His vision 
was not only accurate but penetrating. It was a vision un- 
blurred by his own hasty fancies or his own wishes ; and a 
vision undimmed by prevalent mis-statements or current mis- 



6 — 



conceptions ; a vision never long perturbed by the sophistries 
of men skilled to make "the worse appear the better reason." 
Speaking once of the declaration of Galileo that a ball 
dropped and a ball shot from the mouth of the cannon would 
strike the ground at the same instant, Mr. Lincoln said that 
long before he knew the reasons for it, it seemed to him that 
it must be so. Like Galileo, he saw the thing before and not 
merely after it was proved. He saw that the downward pull 
on both balls must be the same, and that the outward drive of 
the one had nothing whatever to do with the time of its fall. 
We may indeed wonder what might have been his career, if, 
like Michael Faraday, he had first read books of science in- 
stead of the Revised Statutes of Illinois or the Commentaries 
of Blackstone that he found in a pile of rubbish. Fate de- 
creed however, that this rare quality of penetrative wisdom 
should be applied to law and to statecraft — especially to the 
problems then challenging the thought of the American people. 
This vision, moreover, was not only penetrative; it was 
prophetic. He could foresee consequences as distinctly as he 
could discern realities. It was not pure guessing, when he ex- 
claimed : "This nation cannot continue half-free and half- 
slave." It was a prediction derived from steady and consecu- 
tive vision. For genuine logic, like the logic of Euclid that 
fascinated him, is after all a continuous seeing. Given the 
elements of a situation, the mind watches them as consequence 
follows consequence in sure and certain revelation. Never to 
befool oneself about an actual situation and never to befool 
oneself in reasoning upon it — these are the bases of science, 
physical and political. And science is the modern almanac, the 
handbook of prediction, ^^'hen men like Douglas were at- 
tempting to manipulate and thwart the laws of God which de- 
termine national destiny, Abraham Lincoln was humbly study- 
ing them in the spirit of Galileo and of Francis Bacon. 

Daniel Webster once declared that it is wholly unneces- 
sary to re-enact the laws of God. 

The saying, strictly construed, is true enough, but the 
implications of it, as Lincoln saw, are utterly false. We need 
not, indeed, re-enact the laws of God, but our statutes, if they 
shall work benefit and not disaster, must recognize and con- 



form to them. The laws of God left to themselves leave us in 
impotence, and exposed to hunger, disease and disaster. All 
our mastery of the physical world depends upon our actively 
using, not upon our passively submitting to the laws of the 
material universe. In this sense every flying locomotive is a 
re-enactment of the laws of God ; so is every telescope that 
opens to mortal vision the splendors of immensity, and every 
microscope with which we track to their hiding places the mys- 
teries of life and death. So is every temple that we rear, 
every bridge that we build, every steamship that we construct, 
every mill that we erect and every machine into which we 
conduct the energy of steam or electricity. The whole prog- 
ress of civilized man may be measured by the extent to which 
he has learned in his activities to obey and to employ the laws 
of God. So, too, in the political world, the great structures 
that we call commonwealths must, in this sense, be re-enact- 
ments of eternal principles. If they are to be beneficent and 
not malignant, those who create and control them must learn 
the laws by which alone benign results can be obtained. Con- 
stitutions can endure and statutes increase the welfare of the 
people only as they realize and do not contravene the prin- 
ciples of righteousness and progress. Penetrating to this sim- 
ple but tremendous truth, Mr. Lincoln obtained his vision of 
the future ; his prophetic gaze swept the political horizon and 
discerned the inevitable. 

And this foresight was both profound and far-reaching. 
In learned information his horizon might be termed a narrow 
one; but in his grasp of principles and of their ultimate and 
universal consequences he was broader and deeper than any 
statesman of his age. The only time I ever saw him was at 
the flag-raising in Philadelphia on Washington's birthday in 
1 86 1. I could not hear his voice, so great was the intervening 
crowd, but the words that I could not hear I have read and 
pondered often since. 

"I never have had a feeling," said the predestined martyr 
for whom assassins even then were lying in wait, "that did not 
spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of In- 
dependence ; the sentiments which gave liberty not alone to the 
people of this country, but hope to all the world for all future 

— 8 — 



time. It was these that gave promise that in due season the 
weights should be Hfted from the shoulders of all men and 
that all should have an equal chance. And if this country 
cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about 
to say, I would rather be assassinated on this spot than sur- 
render it." If this be narrowness of vision, then may God con- 
tract the eyes of American statesmen to a similar horizon. 

Such was the mind of Abraham Lincoln, a mind that 
gravitated gladly to the truth of things ; a mind that loved 
light and hated darkness ; a mind that found rest only in 
eternal principles, and inspiration in prophetic visions and 
exalted political ideals. 

Possibly under dififerent surroundings he might have 
become a renowned scientist ; more probably through his radi- 
ant and steady intellect united to his great heart would have 
made him even under other conditions a supreme states- 
man. For the scientist seeks chiefly for causes and is satis- 
fied to find and to show them; if he concerns himself for 
beneficent results, as he often does, these are not his princi- 
pal quest. He searches for the seeds of things and delights 
to see them grow. The statesman, on the other hand, seeks 
first, last, and always the welfare of the people. And Mr. 
Lincoln loved the people, craving their happiness and hating 
.oppression even when it assumed the form of law. Mon- 
archs and oligarchs strive mainly to perpetuate their privi- 
leges and to increase their power ; even in republics there be 
those who usurp free institutions in order to enlarge their 
wealth and to entrench their tyranny. Mr. Lincoln perceived 
too clearly and felt too keenly the burdens of the common 
man ever to become the active or the passive instrument of 
any power that would abridge his liberties or diminish the 
opportunities of his children. The Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, so often mentioned in his speeches, he recognized 
as the embodiment of the principles that determine all polit- 
ical progress. Human governments are sanctioned and fa- 
vored by Almighty God. so long, and so long only, as they 
promote the w^elfare of the people and further the progress 
of mankind. Directly they become instruments of oppres- 

— 9 — 



sion, or strongholds of tyranny, they provoke the judgments 
which are righteous altogether, when "the wealth piled up 
by unrequited toil" shall be sunk in the divine wrath "and 
every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by 
another drawn with the sword." 

And he recognized himself, humbly and gladly as a 
product of the principles that he defended. Freedom had 
made it possible for his own soul to expand to dimensions 
not unworthy of its Almighty Architect. One need only to 
read the story of modern Italy, of her exiles and her patriots 
dying in dungeons and upon the scaffold, to see how utterly 
impossible would have been such a career under the Italian 
skies. It is enough to make one weep tears of blood to 
know the tremendous price that the descendants of Dante 
and of Galileo paid for unity and liberty. And her Garibaldi 
grew strong in the shelter of our Declaration of Independ- 
ence. But a poor lad like Abraham Lincoln, even though 
capable of penetrative, prophetic and profound vision — a poor 
lad, awkward in body, homely in features and unaggressive 
in disposition, with no capital but his strong arms, his big 
heart and his luminous brain, could expand to proportions 
worthy of his divine Creator only in the bracing air of free- 
dom and social equality. Nay, he could not have reached 
these splendid dimensions except in a free state of the Amer- 
ican Union — not even in the Kentucky of Henry Clay, or in 
the Virginia that had ceased to think the thoughts of Thomas 
Jefferson. 

Combined with these rare qualities of mind, Mr. Lincoln 
possessed a gift of exact expression that bordered on the 
marvelous. His fidelity of speech matched his fidelity of 
vision. He could say what he saw and make others see 
what he said. "Well! Speed! I'm moved !" he exclaimed 
with laconic humor after carrying his saddle-bags upstairs 
to his friend's room. "Judge Douglas has the high distinc- 
tion of never having said either that slavery is right, or 
that slavery is wrong. Almost everybody else says one or 
the other, but the Judge never does." Such was the sen- 

— lO — 



tence with which he transfixed his dodo^ing anta,c^onist before 
the astonished people of IlUnois. 

"If one man enslaves another, no third man has the 
right to object !" Into those thirteen words he distilled the 
malignant meaning of the Dred Scott decision. 

"The central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy," 
such is the terse statement of the first inaugural, followed by 
a demonstration as lucid as the proposition. 

Galileo used to say that God had written the laws of 
nature in geometrical characters ; Mr. Lincoln believed that 
political principles could be stated with geometrical clear- 
ness, and he confronted his adversaries whenever great 
issues were involved not by denunciation but by illumina- 
tion. If he could not show them, he could at least show 
other people just where they stood and just w'hat they 
meant. 

It is to the enduring honor of the people of Illinois that 
they were large enough to recognize the expanding dimen- 
sions of this strong soul ; that when this clear-eyed defender 
of liberty and union appeared among them their sight was 
sharp enough to see above him the beckoning hand of des- 
tiny. How long is the tradition to endure that handsome 
presence and sonorous voice, swollen periods, glittering plati- 
tudes, reckless assertions, delusive epigrams, and the sneers 
of the sophist suffice for popular leadership? They suffice 
only when the people are unworthy of great statesmen, or 
when inferior and selfish leaders are unopposed by clear 
thinking, plain speaking and intrepid action. They suffice 
never when a soul expanded by the inspiration of great prin- 
ciples grapples with a spirit so swollen and heated with am- 
bition, that it has grown indiflferent to the dignity of its 
Almighty Architect. Douglas was skilled in the arts of 
plausible address, adroit, audacious, evasive, self-assertive, 
denunciatory ; full of the forms of logic, yet reckless of the 
truth. How shriveled and shrunken he appeared when illu- 
minated by the ever-expanding mind of his conqueror! 
Stripped of his pride, of his self-delusions, of the garments of 
party leadership for which he had surrendered the cardinal 



principles of democracy, how small the human remnant 
looked ! His antagonist's soul had expanded to a temple of 
light ; his own brain had dwindled to a gaudy tabernacle of 
ambitious craving and bewildering inconsistencies. "He bar- 
gained with us and then under the stress of a local election 
his knees gave way ; his whole person trembled." Such was 
the railing accusation in i860 of his accuser and fellow- 
bargainer, Judah P. Benjamin. How the accusation de- 
grades them both, even after more than forty years. "He 
bargained with us and then betrayed us." Some day parties 
and communities will learn that men who betray their princi- 
ples in a bargain will betray their purchasers in an extremity, 
wrecking themselves along with those that bought them. 

Not Lincoln's mind alone expanded to dimensions 
worthy of its Almighty Architect, but his whole being took 
on majesty as he assumed responsibilities and set about a 
task which to him seemed even greater than that of Wash- 
ington. His entire administration was a protracted magna- 
nimity. He was great in his forebearance as he was great 
in his performance. Often tempted to use his strength 
against men who, like Greeley, assumed an impatient and dic- 
tatorial tone ; his endurance strained to the breaking point 
by schemers and place-seekers and the cormorants that batten 
and fatten in w^ar times upon the miseries of the people ; 
peering anxiously into the skies above him for some token 
of hope dropped from the hand of God; the Lincoln that 
once carried the village postofifice in his hat bore the destinies 
of millions upon his mighty heart and expanded to the stature 
of the suffering savior of the nation. He mastered his cab- 
inet with serene self-control ; he sustained with matchless 
generosity the successive commanders of the several armies, 
slow to change but swift to praise; with patient vigilance he 
studied the movements of the public mind, waiting for it to 
become the footstool of his great purpose of emancipation, 
while wath the diplomatic skill of an imperturbable wisdom, 
he averted the perils of a foreign war. 

But let me recall two dates that illuminate each other 
strangely and disclose the rare quality of Mr. Lincoln's mag- 



nanimity. On the 5th of August, 1864, when his re-election 
seemed doubtful and almost hopeless to himself, there ap- 
peared in the New York Tribune a three-columned manifesto 
signed by Benjamin F. Wade and H. Winter Davis, two 
notable leaders of the Republican party. "They had read," 
so they began, "without surprise but not without indigna- 
tion the proclamation of July 8th." "A more studied out- 
rage on the legislative authority of the people," they con- 
tinued, "lias never been perpetrated." They sneeringly in- 
quired "upon what the President's hopes of abolishing slav- 
ery through the nation rest." If he wishes the support 
of Congress he must confine himeslf to his executive duties, 
and they conclude with ill-concealed malignity, "the support- 
ers of the government should consider the remedy for these 
usurpations, and having found it, fearlessly execute it." 
White as my hair has grown, there is blood enough in my 
heart to heat it with anger even now as I recall the gloomy 
August day of 1864 on which I first read these cruel words. 
They ought, as we knew long since, never to have been 
written. They were wrong, utterly wrong, and it was un- 
speakably mean to publish them when the destiny of the 
country was trembling in the balance. 

Contrast now these self-righteous statesmen (for states- 
men they were of no small stature) with the man that they 
assailed. They were imperiling the nation to satisfy their 
wounded pride. Mr. Lincoln's one thought was to save, to 
save, to save the Union. 

On the 23rd of August he gave to the members of his 
cabinet, sealed, to be opened only after the election, the fol- 
lowing memorandum : 

"This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceed- 
ingly probable that this administration will not be re-elected. 
Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President- 
elect as to save the Union between the election and the in- 
auguration ; as he will have secured his election on such 
ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards." 

O! gloriously expanded soul! O! temple of the Living 
God not unworthy of its Almighty Architect. Happy the 

— 13 — 



people whose destinies in the hour of impending disaster 
are entrusted to a heart so big, a mind so clear, a will so 
patient and so adamantine! No wonder, therefore, that his 
final utterances fall upon us with such benignity; that they 
seem more like the solemn music of infinite wisdom, and of 
infinite tenderness, than like the speech of mortal man. Did 
some still small voice within him tell him that he, too, must 
be a victim of that partisan malignity which he had never 
shared and never fostered, that it would be a part of the 
punishment allotted to his people that he should be taken 
from them, even before the mighty work was done and 
when as yet the need of him was very great? Brother 
Americans, we can repair that great loss only by entering 
into his spirit; not by statues of him of marble or bronze; 
not, God help us, by reshaping the image of him until^ it 
dwindles into something like ourselves; but by reshaping 
ourselves, our own souls, until they resemble his in its ex- 
pansive power and ultimate nobility. 

If he could return from that bourne from which, alas! 
the sages come not back to bring us wisdom, and frequent 
for a while the Union that he saved, how we should crowd 
around him! What honors and what eulogies would we 
heap upon his transfigured form! But after we had told 
him proudly of our territorial expansion, of our enormous 
wealth, of our splendid cities with their monumental build- 
ings soaring towards the skies, of our flag, the symbol every- 
where of a new world power, of our great industries and 
our colossal fortunes, I think I hear him ask: "But what 
of your men?" Do their "souls expand to dimensions not 
unworthy of their Almighty Architect?" Are they inspired 
by principles that enlarge them to divine proportions? What 
about the Declaration of Independence? Are its principles 
denied and evaded as they used to be, or are they cherished 
and lived up to and exalted? Are its ideas of free govern- 
ment applied or are they being supplanted by those of class 
and caste and special privilege? Are you deceived by forms 
and sonorous phrases? By men who talk liberty and mean 
slaverv? By men who adore the Constitution with their lips 



— 14- 



while their liearts are far from it? Do you fancy, T hear 
him ask, that because you call no man duke or king, you 
are, therefore, free and independent owners of yourselves? 
That because you offer no man openly a crown, you are 
sovereign citizens and self-governing communities? Have 
you not yet learned the dift'erence between the forms and 
the power of self-government? What about your worship 
of the Constitution? There were men in my time who adored 
it in their, speech and who were yet doing their utmost to 
pervert it and to destroy it value. Have the enemies of 
social justice revived the old diabolical trick of interpreting 
it to defend oppression, or have the people mastered the 
divine art of reading it in the light of its sublime intention 
"to form a more perfect union and to promote the general 
Avelfare?" And what about 3'our legislatures, state and na- 
tional ? Have they improved with your material progress ? 
Are statutes carefully prepared and wisely considered? Do 
they enact the laws of God or the will of some powerful 
interest? Do they conform to immutable principles of polit- 
ical wisdom, or are hirelings and demagogues, misguided in- 
competents and ambitious leaders, all wearing the livery of 
freedom, still telling you that you can evade and thwart and 
even nullify with impunity the principles of righteousness 
and equity? Have your political leaders eyes, and can they 
see? Have they brains and can they reason? Or do they 
darken counsel with a multitude of words ? Or shelter them- 
selves in cowardly silence? Have they principles for which 
they are ready to be assassinated, or have they principles 
only for platforms or parade or purchase? 

Fixing upon us those piercing and melancholy eyes, he 
would warn us to learn wisdom in the time of our power and 
our wealth and our opportunity, lest we, too, provoke the 
righteous judgment of God upon ourselves and our poster- 
ity. He would remind us with pathetic solemnity that all 
the miseries of those terrible years in which he suffered for 
us came from judicial blindness, from the sacrifice of con- 
sicence, and truth, and freedom of speech, to avarice and 
ambition and the lust of power ; and lifting his hand to 

— 15 — 



the "Almighty Architect" of his own expanded and trans- 
figured soul, he would call upon us all "to here highly re- 
solve that the dead shall not have died in vain; that this 
nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that govern- 
ment of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not 
perish from the earth." 



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